Structural assessment of historical buildings: a case study of five Ottoman Mosques in Albania

A large portion of Albanian cultural heritage buildings is made of masonry. Many of them due to the decay and degradation of building material, aggressive environmental conditions, frequent seismic activity and various geological phenomena, as well as the lack of maintenance, are found to be in a very bad condition. This paper aims to introduce a case study in structural assessment based on visual inspection of five Ottoman mosques; Naziresha’s Mosque in Elbasan, Mirahor Ilyas Beg Mosque in Korça, the Leaden Mosque in Berat, Murat Beg Mosque in Kruja and the Mosque of Preza, built in Albania during the Ottoman period that are still functional nowadays. Suggestions for improvement of structural capacity and strengthening techniques are proposed taking into consideration preservation of the cultural, historical and architectural values of the mosques

The Fake News Spreading Plague: Was it Preventable?

In 2010, a paper entitled "From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-time search" won the Best Paper Prize of the Web Science 2010 Conference. Among its findings were the discovery and documentation of what was termed a "Twitter-bomb", an organized effort to spread misinformation about the democratic candidate Martha Coakley through anonymous Twitter accounts. In this paper, after summarizing the details of that event, we outline the recipe of how social networks are used to spread misinformation. One of the most important steps in such a recipe is the "infiltration" of a community of users who are already engaged in conversations about a topic, to use them as organic spreaders of misinformation in their extended subnetworks. Then, we take this misinformation spreading recipe and indicate how it was successfully used to spread fake news during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The main differences between the scenarios are the use of Facebook instead of Twitter, and the respective motivations (in 2010: political influence; in 2016: financial benefit through online advertising). After situating these events in the broader context of exploiting the Web, we seize this opportunity to address limitations of the reach of research findings and to start a conversation about how communities of researchers can increase their impact on real-world societal issues

Investigating Rumor Propagation with TwitterTrails

Social media have become part of modern news reporting, used by journalists to spread information and find sources, or as a news source by individuals. The quest for prominence and recognition on social media sites like Twitter can sometimes eclipse accuracy and lead to the spread of false information. As a way to study and react to this trend, we introduce {\sc TwitterTrails}, an interactive, web-based tool ({\tt twittertrails.com}) that allows users to investigate the origin and propagation characteristics of a rumor and its refutation, if any, on Twitter. Visualizations of burst activity, propagation timeline, retweet and co-retweeted networks help its users trace the spread of a story. Within minutes {\sc TwitterTrails} will collect relevant tweets and automatically answer several important questions regarding a rumor: its originator, burst characteristics, propagators and main actors according to the audience. In addition, it will compute and report the rumor's level of visibility and, as an example of the power of crowdsourcing, the audience's skepticism towards it which correlates with the rumor's credibility. We envision {\sc TwitterTrails} as valuable tool for individual use, but we especially for amateur and professional journalists investigating recent and breaking stories. Further, its expanding collection of investigated rumors can be used to answer questions regarding the amount and success of misinformation on Twitter.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, under revie

Conditional assessment of Kiri Bridge in Shkoder, Albania

The Kiri bridge is located 1 km in north-west of Shkoder city and it is the only connection for the city of Shkoder and the Vau i Dejes hydropower station. It is a reinforced concrete bridge with 8 spans, 2 sidewalks and steels parapets on both sides. In this paper general evaluation of the bridge’s current structural conditions and the ability of the bridge to withstand loads from the vehicular traffic are examined. The methodology used in this study consists of the proper definition of the bridge’s structural elements and field inspection of each of them. Deterioration of the structural elements, damage of the paving, parapets and expansion joints are observed at a great extent. The other identified defects are recorded in an inspection form. As a result, the overall conditions were rated 6/10. In this paper some precautions and further measures to be taken are suggested

Strengthening and Restoration of Historical Structures - Mirahor Ilyas Beg Mosque in Korca

The Mirahor Ilyas Beg Mosque, built in 1496 in Korca, is one of a few Ottoman mosques still existing in Albania and the only Ottoman monument in the city. The mosque was built using cut stone and brick. It has a strong image; a cubic mass rising over a square plan. Inside there are found pictures of the mosque in the past and different famous mosques. During its existence, it was damaged from many earthquakes occurring at this area. Due to amortization, the mosque's structural properties were weakened and architectural values were dimmed. Proper strengthening methods need to be applied, not only to improve structural conditions, but also to preserve architectural features of the mosque. In this paper assessment of existing conditions of the structure is carried out. Based on the obtained results, solutions for the structural problems are investigated. As for restoration, repair methods to be applied were examined taking into consideration at what extent the historical values of the building will be preserved. The proposed strengthening methods are the ones which would affect the least the mosque's historical values

Conditional Assessment of Historical Structures: Earthquake Performance of Naziresha Mosque

The Naziresha Mosque is one of the most important historical buildings built during the Ottoman period, still functional in Albania. It is located in Elbasan, a city in the center of Albania. Naziresha mosque was built during 1590s. It has a square plan and a cubic shaped central hall. Though it is a historical monument with unique architectural properties, the current structural condition of the mosque is observed to be severe. Furthermore, the mosque is found in an active seismic area. In this paper, conditional assessment of the mosque and structural behavior is investigated to identify the weak locations of potential failure in the structure. The static behavior and performance under earthquake load of the mosque have been evaluated using the finite element modeling technique, where the behavior of masonry has been taken into account by proper constitutive assumptions. It is believed that the case studies conclusions are applicable to most of Ottoman period mosques in Albania. As a result, significant information on the understanding of the actual structural behavior of historic buildings is presented to provide effective solutions

Usage of ferrocement jacketing for strengthening of damaged unreinforced masonry (URM) walls

In this paper, it is presented the usage of ferrocement jacketing technique as an effective method to improve structural performance of unreinforced masonry panels. Nine diagonal compression tests were conducted on plain, pre-cracked repaired and reinforced masonry panels on six specimen with nominal dimensions of 1.2 x 1.2 x 0.25 m, built and tested in laboratory. The results of the diagonal compression tests were compared in terms of increase in shear strength, drift and the mode of failure. Additionally, finite element modelling using discrete micro-modelling and non-linear analyses were performed using midas FX+ for DIANA 9.6 commercial software to simulate the behavior of plain and reinforced panels. As a result, it was observed that ferrocement jacketing made a considerable improvement in shear strength and deformation capacity for both, repaired and reinforced masonry panels

A case study on structural assessment and restoration of King Zog's villa in Durres, Albania

The city of Durres is the second largest city and one of the oldest ones in Albania. Its existence dates back to 627 BC. There are found many historical monuments that carry significant importance to the city. The Royal King Zog’s Villa in Durres is one of the most interesting structures built in Albania during the Albanian Monarchy period (1928-1939). The villa, located on top of the hill with the height of 98 meters above sea level, was a gift given by the merchants of the city of Durres for King Zog in 1926. The Albanian architect Kristo Sotiri designed it. During its existence, due to amortization and the lack of maintenance, the structural properties of the villa were weakened and the architectural values were dimmed. In this paper, architectural features and current structural conditions of the villa will be analyzed. The methodology used in this study is based on visual inspection of the current condition of the structure as well as a historical survey about the major changes the villa has passed through during the past years

Limits of Electoral Predictions using Twitter

Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social, 17-21 July 2011, Barcelona, SpainUsing social media for political discourse is becoming common practice, especially around election time. One interesting aspect of this trend is the possibility of pulsing the public’s opinion about the elections, and that has attracted the interest of many researchers and the press. Allegedly, predicting electoral outcomes from social media data can be feasible and even simple. Positive results have been reported, but without an analysis on what principle enables them. Our work puts to test the purported predictive power of social media metrics against the 2010 US congressional elections. Here, we applied techniques that had reportedly led to positive election predictions in the past, on the Twitter data collected from the 2010 US congressional elections. Unfortunately, we find no correlation between the analysis results and the electoral outcomes, contradicting previous reports. Observing that 80 years of polling research would support our findings, we argue that one should not be accepting predictions about events using social media data as a black box. Instead, scholarly research should be accompanied by a model explaining the predictive power of social media, when there is one

The power of prediction with social media

Social media provide an impressive amount of data about users and their interactions, thereby offering computer and social scientists, economists, and statisticians – among others – new opportunities for research. Arguably, one of the most interesting lines of work is that of predicting future events and developments from social media data. However, current work is fragmented and lacks of widely accepted evaluation approaches. Moreover, since the first techniques emerged rather recently, little is known about their overall potential, limitations and general applicability to different domains. Therefore, better understanding the predictive power and limitations of social media is of utmost importanc